Alchemist balance 3.PF

[16bearswutIdo]

H e l l o

Looking for opinions on the Alchemist base class in Pathfinder. I have a PC interested in playing it in a 3.5/Pathfinder game coming up.

The party is very low optimization - strongest PC we've had so far was an ubercharging Barbarian. The alchemist will be playing along a gunslinger who all of last campaign kept forgetting to use any of her grit, so low optimization. There will be 2 other PCs whose class is unknown so far. One player is completely new (only thing she's told me is that she wants to play some kind of bear-thing) and the other one is the aforementioned ubercharger player.

Just looking it over, it seems good but not broken. Way more balanced than the 3.5 Artificer we were gonna go with before we found the Alchemist.

Is Alchemist good, bad, broken, or only broken if the player puts effort into it?

[Geddy2112]

Alchemist is a solid tier 3 if played correctly, but I have seen alchemists who didn't use their extracts at all and well, that didn't end well.

[Recherché]

With your group alchemist could be slightly broken if you put the effort in but it's not something that comes accidentally. There are some very high damage bomber builds but they usually require a good amount of effort to make work. The more likely scenario I see is alchemist actually being underpowered in your group if the player doesn't like splat diving for the right extracts/spells and alchemical items or if the player forgets about all the resources at their disposal. An alchemist is only as good as the the alchemy they use.

[Psyren]

It's good - a very balanced class. It is nowhere near as powerful as an artificer, which seems to be what you're looking for.

It's also very versatile. You can build it as a ranged DPR attacker, a melee DPR attacker, a summoner, a crafter, a buffer/healer, or a battlefield controller easily. Its magical abilities (bombs and extracts) tend to have key advantages that spellcasters don't get - such as using the target's actions to cast them instead of the alchemist's, being silent, and in the case of the bombs, being supernatural and thus being able to bypass SR.

[Galacktic]

Alchemist is only broken if you put a ton of effort into it, but it can absolutely be a death machine. I'd say it's a perfectly fine class though if they just play it normally - and remember to use all of their class features. It's sub-par if they forget about say, Extractions or Mutagens.

[16bearswutIdo]

Nice, good to hear, everyone. Gonna go ahead and approve the alchemist. This guy's been wanting to play a character based around alchemy for a while, but 3.5 Alchemy leaves a lot to be desired.

[Ellrin]

Just keep in mind that the alchemy a alchemist practices isn't really the same kind of thing as the alchemy that the Craft (alchemy) skill deals with (though alchemists and their cousin class, investigators, are better at "mundane" alchemy than most classes by default). Alchemist alchemy is definitively magical, and their extracts are almost identical to spellcasting. I don't know if that would be a major sticking point for your alchemically-inclined player.